I added an enemy/bonus pointer (the red thing floating around the player) which shows you the direction of the nearest enemy or, if not available, the nearest bonus item. You already have a radar, but especially at the end of the level it makes is much easier to find what is left.

Since my PC is too slow for most game-capturing software (Core2Duo E7200/Radeon HD5700) while running Zerocron, I finally seem to have found a nice and free open source alternative: Open Broadcaster Software (OBS).

All others I tried either were too CPU-hungry and/or had trouble recording sound.

OBS also didn´t perform so good out of the box, I first had to tweak the settings a bit. Basically I changed the H264-encoding to “ultrafast” with medium quality, resulting in low-cpu and hdd-usage. In case you have the same problem, I thought I´d share my settings with you, relevant stuff is marked yellow. Screenshots are from OBS Version 0.657b.

Today I tweaked Zerocrons audio-effects, it sounds more balanced now and if there´s a lot shooting and explosions simultaneously there is no more acoustic inferno. Also internally, I updated all audio-functions to Game Makers new audio-system.

After some betatesting (still not much feedback, though) I´m now working on a more universal gamepad support. It seems older controllers work fine with the existing code, but not Xbox compatible ones. But the Xbox compatible functions don´t support the old joypads – so I guess I have to combine both.

I´m still working on my real arcade-cab, but at least I functionally finished my Ikea Ramvik Arcade Cocktail table. It still needs some decoration and something stylish under the glass to cover the ugly sawed edges.

To build it was simple, I sawed a monitor-shaped hole in it, screwed two boards below to support the monitor, placed the monitor in and connected everything.

It is powerd by an energy-saving TFT-Display and a raspberry pi running RetroPie and generic USB-Joypads.

The only obstacle happend all was done and I wanted to play a game, sat down on my sofa – and then had to realize that the picture was nearly not visible due to the low viewing angle.

I read a bit and voila – if you turn the monitor upside down it works just fine. And if you add “display_rotate=2” to RetroPie´s boot/config.txt it rotates everything accordingly.